BIG GOAT LITTLE GOAT

This all started seven years ago. But we'll skip ahead from there to, oh, two years back, when I started thinking about mecha again.

I dig giant robots. Everyone does. There's more mech RPGs out there than you can shake a hardpoint-mounted fully-automatic stick at, and they generally fall into one of two categories:

• Exhaustive simulations with an obsession over heat management, equipment loadouts and comparative weight classes (Steel Battalial-Type)

• Sad games about isolation and our inability to connect where the giant robots are a metaphor for intergenerational trauma or something (Evangelial-Type)

Neither of them were scratching my giant robot itch. You know what I like about giant robots? It's not actually the "robot" part. It's the "giant" part, and especially how that part interacts with urban infrastructure. I wanna see the buildings get fucked up. I wanna see the big lad fall down and ruin several million dollars worth of bridge.

(I am fascinated by videos of cranes collapsing, demolitions, construction mishaps, those CCTV ones where a hundred big shelves fall over, and so on: taking something unbreakable like a house and smashing it to bits so casually is dreadfully exciting to me. I am always thrilled when a videogame has deformable or destructible terrain; it's another verb you can play around with during the match.)

BUT.

NO-ONE WRITES ROLEPLAYING GAMES ABOUT THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE. And fair enough! You catch more flies with twenty different kinds of laser-guided honey than you do with rubble vinegar. But, I thought, maybe I could. Maybe I've got what it takes to make a giant robot game where the impact of being a honking great iron dude matters on the things around you.

RAVENLOFT BUT WITH MECHA IN

Here are three pages of notes I made two years back. I was basing the setting on SCOURGE, some worldbuilding I did for an Italian game as a KS stretch goal a few years back, which amounts to "Ravenloft but with Mecha in, specifically to piss off Chris." (It's a fun setting! You can pilot the ambulatory form of your ancestral manor into combat. Or drive a walking tank powered by bound angels!)

[notes]

At the end of page three I realised that Resource is boring and Heat is exciting, as indicated by the way I wrote it down in big capital letters. And then I drew two ideas for unrelated scratch-built miniatures and abandoned the whole thing

As you can see, I didn't get terribly far. It operates in a Psi*Run style, where you're rolling handfuls of dice and placing them on a results sheet, and you get to choose whether you get hurt or the city gets hurt or you spend Resource or whatever.

(Psi*Run is fuckin great, by the way. It's the inspiration behind the system for ADMINISTRATIVE CARNAGE and, latterly, DOGMASTERS OF THE WASTELAND. Look it up if you haven't already.)

Part of the problem with collateral is that it doesn't matter in a short-form roleplaying game; you don't have the time to establish why this building is important and what's at stake if it's destroyed. (I experienced exactly the same thing with espionage contacts and assets in my first draft of Spire, which I believe I detailed on this very Patreon back in 2014. It's hard to make people care about things.)

BUT. I was chatting with a friend over DM, who was similarly lamenting the lack of enjoyable giant robot games. And I had to write a game this month, as I do every month, so I got to thinking: maybe I do have what it takes, now. To make a game about it. I mean. The collateral. I had a core idea - the more dangerous you are, the more dice you roll, and the more dice you roll, the more chance you've got to cause widespread property damage.

A THING I DO

I do a thing sometimes. I don't believe that my marijuana use makes me more creative or unlocks any particular wisdom in my tattered old brain - quite the opposite. It makes me stupid and I start losing the thread of my own sentences. But one thing it does do is shut down the pachinko cavalcade that my brain can transform itself into when not sufficiently stimulated, and let me get really fascinated with one thing in particular.

So, if I've got an idea that I can't quite develop, I'll put a bit more weed in my brain than usual, and I'll become fascinated. I'll rotate it in my head. I'll repeat that core idea over and over and build off it. (I tend not to write any of this shit down. Most of it's useless.) You could say that I'm worshipping the problem, to steal the words if not the intended meaning of someone else's turn of phrase.

(I don't know if it works, by the way. But at least I'm high when it's happening.)

I had a couple of goes at doing that with this. I could smell something fascinating behind the idea; establishing a town that your mechs were protecting, then having to cope with the its destruction at your own giant robot hand. The town provides augments and maintenance for your mechs; when specific things are destroyed or damaged, you suffer. The people who live there are your support network; when they're unhappy, (or dead!) you're unhappy, and that somehow relates to skill use.

THE NIGHT EVERYONE DIED

Maybe the town getting destroyed is the point! Maybe that's an automatic thing, a couple of sessions in. You get swarmed by feral robots and they tear it to bits and all these systems for keeping you and your robot running are stretched past breaking point. So they're ironic. Or if not ironic, at least quite clever, and that's something to enjoy. The gameplay deals with scraping together not enough resources to keep everyone alive. The recoil baffling on shot-cannon is so knackered that if you fire it on full auto it'd rip your mech's arm off. You haven't had a decent meal since you accidentally burned down the farms during the last incursion.

Now, some of the more astute (and sober) amongst you may have realised what it took me around ten hours of thinking and four pages of notes to realise: this is too much game to fit on one page.

A quarter of it would be taken up with the bloody map of the town! How can I fit in all the rules for different kinds of big robot? And how fuckin brisk can the rules be and still be fun to play through? How can we strike a balance between freeform "do the thing and I'll tell you what happens" and structured gameplay experiences with mechanics to cover how much of the town is destroyed after each encounter?

Here are the gags I wrote for the names and that. Bit of fun eh

Ten hours in, I had lunch with Maz and lamented; too much game, not enough space. And Maz reminded me, very sensibly, that maybe instead of smashing this concept to bits so it fits on a single page, I could instead funnel it into the roleplaying game book publishing business that we run.

So I packed it in. Or rather: I stopped trying to make it small enough to fit this format, and maybe a year and change from now we'll put out a Havoc Engine, Eat the Reich-style capsule game where you create and than unwittingly destroy a township with your massive steel feet.

GOATS, THEN

Seven years ago. Hearty Dice Friends was a podcast that I Chris and I used to do before he got tired of having to be funny for an hour on mic every week, and who can blame him. We used to design games on there, or rather do the fun bit of designing games on there in as much as we had some loose ideas and made jokes about them - and one of them was BIG GOAT LITTLE GOAT, a game in which one player is a very large goat and the other player is a very small goat, and they must steal lipstick from a large department store and then eat it.

I've always enjoyed the trope of "one big guy, one small guy." Big guys make small guys seem smaller (and vice versa!), and it provides a useful dichotomy to play around with during a session - there should be problems that one guy can't solve, problems that the other guy can solve, and some fun stuff in the middle where neither of them are good at it but we can all enjoy watching them struggle.

(Like: Ren and Stimpy! Mister Coffin and Mister Nail, the awful cosmic grave-robbers that Chris and I played in On Hallowed Shores! George and Lenny! Groot and Rocket Raccoon! The playable characters from Shadow of Rome, basically! Any D&D 3.5 character who wore the controversial gnomish combat harness, and the armed gnome they carried in it!)

The reason I wittered on about the mech game for so long is to prove a point - I stopped trying to write it after lunch, opened another document and wrote "BIG GOAT LITTLE GOAT" at the top and was 90% done in under an hour. I wasn't trying to be clever. I wasn't trying to be ironic. I was trying to create the purest form of "one of you is big and the other one is small" that I could manage. It's not posturing or posing or trying to impress you. It's a fun way to spend an hour.

And: it's good! It is, technically, an animal crime game, so that's a well-established area of expertise for me. I'm happy with how stupidly loose it is, and how everyone gets a special dice to roll, and most of the jokes. I realised after writing it that it was simple enough to play with children, but honestly you could just yell "BIG GOAT LITTLE GOAT TIME" at 'em, get down on all fours and start bleating, and you'd have a superior experience.

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That's all for now. Later on this month, I have a treat for you: Chant, one of our Producers at RRD (and the fellow who handles the physical mailouts for this Patreon), said he wanted something to do so I told him to write a one-page game. You'll get it in a couple of weeks once he's back from his holidays and I can convince him to write a long-winded diary disguised as design notes.

Love and fury,

• Grant